Getting Started

TACC provides high performance computing, visualization, data analysis, storage, software, and cloud, gateways & portal interfaces. Every day, TACC's staff work with hundreds of researchers, enabling them to discover new drugs, develop renewable energy sources, and visualize the explosion of a star, among many other important discoveries. Not just for scientists and engineers, TACC's resources can be used by technologists, industry partners, educators, humanities scholars, and others.

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Video Guide(s) Playlist to Create a TACC or XSEDE Account

Video 1: Creating a TACC User Account (non-UT System users) This tutorial will guide you through the basic steps to create your TACC user account. This video is for users outside of the University of Texas system.

Video 2: Creating a TACC User Account (UT System users) TACC has a single sign-on process for researchers in the UT System. This tutorial will demonstrate how to link your UT System credentials to either an existing TACC account, or to a new one you create.

Video 3: Creating an XSEDE User Account This tutorial will guide you through the process of creating a new user account with XSEDE. XSEDE User Portal: portal.xsede.org

Compute

Solving the world's biggest problems requires the world's biggest solutions and TACC's advanced computing systems are among the most powerful in the world. These systems are fundamental to science and society, allowing researchers to push the boundaries of human knowledge and tackle the biggest scientific challenges we face today.

TACC offers the most comprehensive set of systems to the open science community. All of TACC's systems are connected through a high speed network to a 20 PB global share work file system. All users are allocated 1 TB that is accessible from all HPC and visualization resources including compute nodes.

Data Services

In this day and age, conducting scientific research relies on the analysis and interpretation of tremendous amounts of data. To find meaning in this sea of information, researchers must first be able to organize, store, and share their data. Once data are stored, researcher are able to leverage the advances in data analysis and computing capabilities, frequently referred to as "Big Data," to enable the systems at TACC to bring understanding and structure to these complex problems and highlight potentially interesting results in data sources too large for any team of people to explore by hand.

Every day, researchers leverage TACC's high-speed, high-density data systems and powerful computational systems to make this possible. With more than 100 petabytes of dedicated user storage and several new systems designed specifically for data analysis and computations, TACC is a leader in the deployment and use of data intensive computing.

Visualization

Imagine traveling through the human bloodstream to view the microscopic viruses that cause illness; getting a first-hand look at the Sun's solar eruptions; or studying individual brushstrokes in Van Gogh's Starry Night. All of this is possible using advanced visualization techniques and technologies.

TACC's visualization resources blend science, technology and art to bring the complexities of our world to life helping solve large-scale problems. TACC's systems allow researchers to conceptualize and process extremely detailed visualizations and data sets at a massive scale.

Cloud Computing

Scientific research produces massive amounts of data, and the resulting datasets are of great value to researchers for years and even decades to come. These datasets are often extremely large and must be easily and quickly accessible as well as stored in a protected environment. Cloud computing provides instantaneous, secure access to computing resources. TACC's comprehensive set of cloud services are designed for researchers who need large-scale resources, but prefer a virtualized, on-demand environment – allowing them to efficiently perform modeling and simulations, visualization, data analytics, and management from any location.

Gateways & Portals

Using supercomputers can be challenging for those without much computing experience. That's why the Advanced Computing Interfaces (ACI) group at TACC develops gateways and portals tools that make using TACC resources easier — enabling more scientists and engineers to make discoveries and answer important research questions.

Gateways and portals enable researchers in a common field of science to use systems and resources through a familiar, targeted interface so they can focus on their research and not on the cyberinfrastructure behind the scenes. Gateways and portals also foster collaborations and the exchange of ideas among researchers.

The TACC Gateways & Portals group plays a very active role in XSEDE. TACC is the project lead for User Services, User Information and Interfaces, and manages the XSEDE user portal.

Arts & Humanities

The proliferation and accessibility of massive online databases of textual, visual and aural resources have brought new complexity to the study of history, languages, civilizations, and human activities. More than ever before, advanced computational systems, tools and techniques are required to visualize, display, analyze, manage and preserve digital resources.

TACC staff collaborate with researchers from colleges at the University of Texas at Austin – including the Colleges of Liberal Arts, Fine Arts, Communications, Architecture, Social work, McCombs School of Business and the LBJ School of Public Affairs – to discover new ways that advanced computing may be applied in these areas.